Entertainment

FotoFlexer - An Interview With Sharam Shirazi And Neil Warren

Wednesday afternoon I had the pleasure of speaking with Sharam Shirazi, the brand new CEO of FotoFlexer, as well as Neil Warren, the lead developer for the company. I was unfamiliar with the product except by name recognition only. In preparation for the interview, I took a look at what the web based imaging software was capable of and was quite impressed.

Fotoflexer is one of many hand selected web app developers who hope to see great growth from the relationship they've forged with Google's new OpenSocial platform, a system designed to bring the functionality of Facebook's third-party app system to the rest of the social web.

After we exchanged initial pleasantries, we began the interview:

Can you give me an the readers an overview of Fotoflexer and what it offers?Sharam: Its been said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. We like to think that what our software is able to do is provide magic. The best example of that is the the smart resize function. With it you can crop someone out of a photo like that brother-in-law from the family trip. You can resize an image without distortions, utilizing smoe really advanced algorithms that yields incredible results. It cuts out people as if it were magic, and really consistently elicits a wow on people from people who try it.

What is your tool akin to, in the traditional photo editing world? Is it a Picasa or a Photoshop?Neil: We like to say that we provide 80-90% of the feature-set that is commonly used by Photoshop users. If you look at other web-based applications, or even desktop based applications, you'll find that most other software packages don't provide near the features we provide. We bring highly complex features you'll find in professional grade photo editing packages in a user-friendly package, and we do that free of charge to the end user.

There is indeed a high barrier to entry with the professional grade packages, both in terms of skill to use, price of the product and the programming bloat. How does Fotoflexer compare in those respects?Neil: Load times for the application are incredibly quick, and our simple filters are lightning fast. Our more comprehensive filters and effects can take a few seconds. Photoshop takes a lot of memory and system resources, and has a comparatively enormous load time. Fotoflexer is only a several hundred K download. Its browser memory and CPU loads aren't very outside the norm of typical browsing usage. An element to our success, and where we deviate from typical desktop based editing is that we don't have proprietary formats that take up lots of memory, and entire photo isn't loaded into memory at once.

What are some other popular features of Fotoflexer?Sharam: My personal favorite is the Andy Warhol effect, and something that has a lot of viral success because after your friends see your profile picture turned into an Andy Warhol style image, they definitely want to try it out. One that skews to our younger users is the Cartoonify effect, which will create a cartoon of a profile picture. In addition to the standard and basic filters, we have a lot of entertainment value in addition to sophisticated photo features.

Let's talk OpenSocial a minute. How did the relationship with Google come about?Sharam: The relationship came about really through networking of the folks at Fotoflexer. Neil played a big part, working hand in fist, so to speak, with the Mountain View folks.

Niel: We initially were invited along with other top application developers as part of a Google outreach program to the development community. After the initial sessions, we were invited back for for further demonstration and talks with Google, and then subsequently invited back for a series of technical meetings about integration with the Open Social platform. At each subsequent meeting, it was clear they were more and more pleased with what we and our software could do, and from there the really relationship blossomed.

What are you doing within the frame work? Are you coming at it strictly as an application, or are you implementing social features at the application site as well?Sharam: We're really focused on image editing, and we want to be a plug-in to our various social partners across the web. Our driving force is to come up with great new image technologies for use elsewhere in the social web. We are the creators of the imaging utilities, and our partners are the users.

So you're not looking to simply be a profile widget, but an actively used application?Well, whatever the marketplace needs, its our aim to fill that niche. You can use Fotoflexer from our site, or from within various social places like Facebook. It's premature for me to say what direction we'll ultimately be heading. We'll follow the market and we want to keep the future open.

Well, then without revealing too much strategy, what is your opinion of where it's all heading?You're asking me to look into a crystal ball. I honestly don't know. I can say that social networks that are successful domestic or abroad, and they will do what they do. We'll be doing our best to follow. This OpenSocial technology allows us to do it on a much wider base than before. It's also important to note that we essentially didn't exist in terms of a user base a few months ago. Now, due to following the market in terms of social usage, we have more than one million users. The sky's the limit, and we feel like we're riding a wild tiger.

Where is the growth coming from, mostly? What was the best move that lead to this rampant growth?Honestly, it has been sprinkled in a lot of areas. We've seen substantial on our own website, and Facebook provided great growth for us as well. We've also begun examining licensing contracts, where other companies see the abilities of our technology and want to use it for their own applications. There are lots of pressures and opportunities as a company to follow the marketplace. We are going to keep up the pace of new market innovation, though. We plan to provide a stream of applications to be released on a regular basis.

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